Our youngest was always going to be our last baby. After all, God had given us just four genetic children: three earthside, one miscarriage. Four kids. That was it. And, put simply, we were incredibly certain of this mandate. So certain that Taylor got a vasectomy a month before our youngest was even born. Indeed, we continued to be so certain about our genetic parenthood. And yet… increasingly, our family felt incomplete. We knew that we weren’t supposed to create any more of our kids… but we began to think that, perhaps, we were meant to adopt someone else’s kids.
This was much easier said than done, especially since every potential avenue led to a definitive dead-end. Again and again, we found ourselves saying “no." No, foster care is not the right option for our family. That is an extremely difficult calling to which we do not incline at all. No, domestic adoption is not the right option for our family. There is no shortage of infertile couples who want newborns, and for the sake of our preexisting children, we won’t adopt outside of birth order. No, international adoption is not the right option for our family. We have three kids under five, and we literally can’t afford the travel and in-country cohabitation requirements. But… what other kinds of adoption are there? None that we could think of. Accordingly, we were at a total impasse: longing for another child that we seemingly couldn’t have. The situation felt utterly intractable. We pleaded with God—either to alter our decision matrix, or to mend our cavernous heartbreak.
And then, at the right time and in the right way, God moved. In a single moment, He bent our story in a completely unexpected direction.
Taylor didn’t immediately realize that he was the instrument of this change. After all, it was just a simple text: My work buddy and his wife just did their first round of IVF. Who could have anticipated how that information would hit me? Indeed, it felt almost like a physical assault. I clutched at my chest and murmured, “But what will happen to their extra babies? Will they get the chance to be born?”
My heart broke at the thought of the couple’s lonely babies, waiting in frozen darkness for the chance to be transferred. And then, I pictured not just those babies, but all of them. After all, this was hardly the first couple to do IVF—or, indeed, to face the issue of “extra babies." So, how many was “all of them?" A quick Google search turned up a mind-boggling statistic. In the United States alone, a million and a half embryos linger in cryogenic sleep. As I had guessed, many of those are considered “leftover." Those leftover embryos… a lot of them just remain frozen, indefinitely. Many couples continue paying their cryogenic fees for years—or even decades—after having their last embryo transfer. Even so, this frozen purgatory just kicks the can down the road—because in the end, there are only two outcomes. Whether it takes months or years or decades, each embryo will either live… or it will die. But if the genetic parents can’t transfer the embryo…. I blinked away tears as I typed my next search: How to adopt leftover embryos.
From a logistical standpoint, we had no idea where to even start… and so we quickly realized that, were we to pursue this opportunity, we’d be opting for a more-expensive facilitated adoption. We were quickly drawn to Snowflakes Embryo Adoptions, which, it turns out, was the very first “embryo adoption” agency. They were the perfect fit to help us pursue this avenue. Fast forward through the application and home study phase, in March 2024—a little over one year after we began our embryo adoption journey—Snowflakes notified us that we had been selected by a pair of genetic parents. Five embryos created in 2011, slow frozen. We had willingly conceded this when we enrolled in Snowflakes’s Open Hearts Program, which works specifically with the most difficult-to-place embryos, which can contain slow-frozen embryos created many years ago.
Since we hadn’t heard otherwise from God, we quickly judged that “a deep sense of ambivalent resignation” did not rise to the necessary threshold for rejection. After all, why had we enrolled in the Open Hearts program if not to seek and save the embryos most in need of a home? Wasn’t that why we had chosen a clinic with a history of accepting slow-frozen embryos? Wasn’t my heart torn specifically for “lonely babies?"
Accordingly, from that first night, we leaned strongly toward accepting the match, although we were still committed to praying about the path before us. And thus, we accepted the match. We waited in hopeful anticipation for our clinic to accept the embryos. Only our clinic rejected the embryos. We were advised by them that if our goal is to have a baby, these aren’t the embryos that will help us achieve that. I was so willing to die on this hill. I responded, “You’re right—it is our goal to have a baby at the end of this. But it’s not our primary goal. Our primary goal is to live out the gospel by honoring the dignity and worth of every human—and in this case, that means giving these embryos a chance at life outside the freezer.” They’re image-bearers, I reminded myself. And life is worth fighting for. Plus, there was the other thing. I named them—so while I may never be their mother, I am certainly meant to be their guardian.
After contracts were signed, I was the guardian of these five precious souls.
When it came time to thaw the embryos, three did not survive. Two began growing, but ultimately only one continued to grow and was able to be transferred. I reflected on what God had taught me earlier in the process: Not all seeds sprout, but some do. Oh, Lord, please. Some do. Given the statistics for vitrification, “survival” was the most likely outcome… but even so, we continued to pray. A week later, the very faintest line showed up on an at-home pregnancy test. The following week, a serial hCG blood test confirmed that my body believed itself to be pregnant. A barely-positive pregnancy test. Truly, it was the very faintest line. But it was there.
Shortly thereafter, we saw something we had never seen with our miscarriage: a heartbeat. Then, several months later, it was revealed to us that our baby was a boy. And as of March, Caelestis Ray has begun his earthside adventure. Our whole family is enjoying this season, and we happily share our experience with others. We recognize that—as the sole survivor of five single-cell, slow-frozen embryos—Caelestis has an inspirational and unusual story.
